the West after they had remained in the East long enough to earn sufficient money for their western trip. Some came by way of New Orleans and up the rivers to Peoria. There they usually lived and worked a while until they could buy the teams and wagons and other necessary articles for their homestead venture. After 1850 the people came with the idea of making this area a permanent home; they may well be called settlers and not pioneers, although in eastern Woodford County many did live as had the early pioneers in settling this unbroken ground. Soon they had close neighbors, received frequent mail, had new schools, churches and stores such as were unknown to the 1828-1850 pioneers.

By 1850 there were three more canals, two from Lake Erie to the Ohio River, and in our own state the Michigan Canal had been operating 120 miles west from Chicago for two years. There were a few dirt highways, and the prospect of railroads in the near future encouraged settlers to come by the scores. Many Woodford County settlers came through Zanesville and Brownsville, Ohio, then towns which had several inns to accomodate the migrants. Their papers described regular cavalcades of people in Conestogas and prairie schooners. Others came on horseback and some few walked. Such groups were passing daily through to Dayton and the West. Those who stopped at the inns for lodging found them generally pleasant places with plenty of food, but some inns had signs saying that they would not accommodate "waggoners."

More travelers were arriving daily by boat and highway in Chicago than the new hotels there could care for. That young town was rapidly becoming a transportation center with increasing demands for supplies for all these people wanting to settle in our state. If they had brought their own goods they needed wagons and teams to make the rest of their journey, if such could pull through the deep mud of the Chicago streets. Sometimes the heavy loads would be mired for hours. An insurance executive once pointed out a spot from his office window high up in the Insurance Building on Jackson Boulevard where less than a block away he had watched such a scene in his youth. Men pried and dug for hours to aid a double team to pull a heavy wagon out of the mud there, an experience that would be repeated again and again as they would move out onto the prairies.

With so many new settlers came opportunities for business and professional people. Money was being invested in new enterprises, doctors and lawyers were hanging up their signs although some of the latter were only "would-be" doctors since no state license was required until 1877. The new lawyer needed only about thirteen books: a copy of Blackstone's Commentaries, eleven Illinois Reports and one Illinois Appellate Court Reports. Lawyers today will use over a thousand.

Courts are no longer the source of entertainment they were in those days of oratorical ability, emotional appeal and native wit. Pioneers

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